He’s actually here.
Thomas quickly says, “I know things are weird even though we didn’t want them to be.” He looks me straight in the eyes, and I try and catch my breath. I don’t know whether to float or sink yet. “But you’re my best friend and I miss having you around. I know you don’t actually have a thing for me. Drinking confuses people like that, so we’ll call the whole thing taboo and not talk about it for the next ten years or so. Let’s hang and talk about Sun Warden while I apply to a job to—”
“Why can’t I like you?”
“Because it wouldn’t work out in the long run,” Thomas says.
“Because I don’t fit into your little hierarchy of needs?”
“Because I’m straight. Stretch.” His voice has an edge now. “I thought we wanted to forget it ever happened.”
“Yeah, well. Forgetting isn’t as easy as you’re making it sound.” My throat tightens. “I can’t sit around you and act like nothing happened, or to wait around for you to figure things out.”
“There’s nothing to figure out,” Thomas says. “I know I can be really confused about what I should be doing with my life and how I feel like I don’t belong, but I have no doubts about what gets my heart going and my dick hard. That’s not meant to be a blow to you, Stretch, but it’s just the way I’m wired.”
“I was like that once. I denied it, but then I met you over there by that fence and it flipped around everything I ever thought about myself. I didn’t want to be unhappy so I stopped dating someone I can’t actually love. I get it if you need more time.”
“I can’t live up to this fantasy playing out in your head,” Thomas shoots back.
Without thinking about it, I hug him and hold on to him even though he’s not hugging me back. “I can’t promise I’ll wait.”
I don’t think the pain will vanish the way Evangeline thinks it will. I’m sure waiting for unfulfilled expectations will only make weeks feel like months, months feel like decades, and decades feel like my end of days. If there’s no happiness waiting for me there, then I lived a life without laughs and smiles and that’s not living at all.
I turn my back on him.
I move back into the complex and walk across the third court when two big hands grab my shoulders. I half expect it to be Thomas spinning me around to lead me somewhere private, but instead I find myself falling forward and rolling into a pillar by my building. Fear chokes me. I doubt it’s those bastards from the Joey Rosa Projects because I had nothing to do with Me-Crazy beating their boys down.
This attack is personal. These are my friends. I pick myself up. It’s Me-Crazy, backed by Brendan, Skinny-Dave, and Nolan—too many to outrun.
“Fight back, faggot,” Me-Crazy challenges, rolling his eyes back until they’re just white. He’s going to start pounding on his head any moment now and I’ll be laid out.
“What the fuck is your problem?” I ask him.
“Me-Crazy saw you hugging your boyfriend,” Me-Crazy says.
Nolan chimes in, “Why you playing with other dudes? You had a bomb-ass girlfriend, and Bren told us you stopped hitting that.”
“It’s for your own good,” Brendan says, too ashamed to look me in the eye like the man he wants me to be and thinks he is. He cracks his knuckles and rocks back and forth, and I almost laugh at how ridiculous he looks.
I get in his face, so close that I could kiss him and really piss them all off. “Come on, guys. Try and beat it out of me.”
The rules of the street aren’t clear, but I’ve known people—Brendan, actually—who walked away from a serious beat-down from our rival high school because he kicked one guy’s ass and earned everyone’s respect. Maybe if I fuck up Brendan, or Skinny-Dave who looks too high for his own good, that’ll get them to back off.
Brendan shoves me. I recover. I shove him back and slam into him with the hardest head-butt I can swing without knocking myself out. Brendan, somewhat dazed, fakes right and swings a hard uppercut into my chin with his left. I kick him in his knee, hard like he taught me, and he collapses so I knee him in the nose. Then Skinny-Dave comes at me with a sucker punch, but it’s Me-Crazy who actually tackles me down to the ground and I know I’ve lost. I can’t move out from under his grip. Now it’s all pain. Resisting gets harder and everything becomes dimmer and blurrier with each punch to my face and each blow to my chest. Me-Crazy is roaring while he strangles me, and Skinny-Dave and Nolan stomp me out.
I shout and twist and cry and guard my face with the one arm I manage to get free. Me-Crazy gets off of me and I think it’s over. I’m so dizzy. The ground I’m crumbled on is spinning around, first one way and then another. I don’t even bother trying to crawl away. I feel like I’m falling . . .
No, someone is picking me up. I confused up with down. But the terrifying sensation of Crazy Train Mode is insanely familiar. He runs with me over his shoulder, and I hear Brendan yelling at him to stop, that he’s taking it too far, but Me-Crazy keeps running. I don’t know where we’re going until we crash through the glass door of my building and I’m sprawled across the lobby floor.
There’s an explosion in the back of my head, a delayed reaction. Blood fills my mouth. This is what death feels like, I think. I scream like someone is turning a hundred knives inside of me, spitting up blood as I do. And I’m not crying because of the attack. I’m crying because there’s new noise in my head, and it builds from a couple faded echoes into an uproar of jumbled voices—all the memories I once forgot have been unwound.
PART ZERO: UNHAPPINESS
HERE TODAY,
GONE TOMORROW
(AGE NINE)
It’s way past my bedtime but I can’t sleep because of a really real nightmare—myself.
There’s been enough crying in my family lately but I can’t control myself. Mom tries to calm me down in the kitchen with cranberry juice. It’s stupid, but I cry harder because I’m jealous of Brendan and how his house is better with better juice and better video games because his parents have more money than we do.
Mom hugs me to her shoulder as I sit on the kitchen counter. “Baby, you can tell me anything. I love you as you are.”
I don’t want to tell anyone, but I’m scared something will happen to me if I don’t.
“Baby, my son, you are safe. Nothing bad will ever happen to you, I promise.”
“I think I’m . . .” I take a deep breath. “I can’t say it. I’m too scared.”
Eric pops up from around our old and busted stereo system and shouts, “You’re gay! No one cares!”
“NO! NO! I’m scared I’m going to become crazy like Uncle Connor and eat too many pills and die.” I punch this plastic bin where we keep packets of salt, pepper, and ketchup Mom pockets from restaurants and everything spills onto the floor. “You’re an asshole!”
I got my bad temper and bad mouth from Dad. I jump off the counter to punch him in his stupid face but Mom drags me back.
“Aaron! Aaron! Stop! Eric, back to bed now!”
Eric doesn’t taunt me like he usually does whenever Mom or Dad or my cousins hold me back from fighting him. He shrugs. “I’m only trying to help, freak.”
Freak. Freak. Freak. Freak.
(AGE TEN)
Mom bought us the newest PlayStation for Christmas, plus a discounted X-Men game because she had a little extra money left over. We’re playing and Eric chooses Wolverine because he likes playing as the main characters. He calls himself a “one-man army” since he’s always good with them. I choose Jean Grey because she can transform into Dark Phoenix and becomes extra powerful. She has this really cool flight-and-fire trick I saw in the video’s game demo at the store.
“Stop choosing the girl characters! Be a boy!”
I choose Cyclops instead.
(AGE ELEVEN)
The superintendent brings his wrench out at 11:00 a.m. like ev
ery summer and jerks open the fire hydrant. Jets of water blast free and some kids stop to take off their shirts while others charge straight in to cool down.
Brendan takes his shirt off.
He’s been my best friend since first grade and I see him all the time but I don’t stop looking at him until Baby Freddy tells me we’re playing tag and I’m it. I only chase after Brendan, like a magnet. When I finally catch him, I tag him on his bare shoulder, and my hand stays there a little longer than it needs to.
Brendan finally comes back from visiting his family in North Carolina this weekend and I’m so excited. While he was gone, I really got into comic books to pass the time that would’ve been spent playing with him. I even draw one just for him.
It’s a Pokémon comic with its pictures colored in by pens. There are a lot of eraser streaks from my outlining stage but he won’t care. It’s about Brendan becoming a Pokémon master and shows how unstoppable he is throughout all his gym battles.
I hope he likes it.
(AGE TWELVE)
Mrs. Olivia taught the class about Shakespeare and all his plays today.
I’m on the couch next to Dad while he watches basketball with Eric. The game is really boring. Since learning about theater and our school’s drama club, I want to become an actor who will star in really cool action movies like Scorpius Hawthorne with sword fights and magical battles. I would rather watch movies than a bunch of sweaty guys trying to put a ball through a hoop so I can study how to be an actor, especially since so much has changed since Shakespeare was alive. (If he was ever really alive. I think he might be made up, like Santa and Jesus but grown-ups tell you he’s real.)
“Dad, did you know that men used to play the roles of women in Shakespeare’s plays? That’s pretty funny, right?”
Dad turns away from the game for the first time all night. “You’re a boy,” he says. “Don’t ever act like a girl.”
(AGE THIRTEEN)
Brendan runs up to me. “Yo! Yo! I just got my first blow job!”
I get a little heated. I’m just surprised, you know. “Whoa. Awesome. From who?”
“Some girl who’s friends with Kenneth and Kyle. She thinks Kyle is cuter because he’s coming into his mustache, but I talked a good game and got her into my pants. I am a god!”
I pat his back. “Good job, dude. Good job.”
Brendan sees Baby Freddy coming out of our building with his baseball equipment. “Hold up, let me go tell that little shit.” Brendan runs off and I feel a little sick.
(AGE FIFTEEN)
There’s definitely something going on between us: we spend all of Earth Science passing illustrated notes back and forth instead of listening to Ms. O mispronounce minerals with her thick Puerto Rican accent; we always come up with bullshit excuses to keep hanging out after school; we trade stories at this pretty cool chicken spot; we go to the movies and throw candy and chocolate into our buckets of popcorn; we rest our arms next to each other’s. Mostly we play around a lot in the park, just the two of us, like a secret. A secret we suck at hiding because everyone already suspects we’re dating, but I’m still pretty damn shocked when I hear: “You should be my boyfriend.”
I gotta admit, I thought I was doomed to a life of hookups like Brendan and Skinny-Dave. Or more like Baby Freddy who always chases and never catches anything. I never thought someone would give me the hand-holding treatment. This must mean that I was wrong about everything I thought about myself. I scoot a little closer to Genevieve on the park bench. I squeeze her hand and say, “Sure. I’ll give being your boyfriend a shot.”
I don’t understand.
It all felt so right in that moment I agreed to date her. I was the straightest guy I knew, but when I got home that night, I was still thinking about other guys. Not Brendan anymore; I got turned off from him after hearing him talk about sleeping with girls as conquests. No, I think about the dudes I see undress in the locker room at school, the ones sitting across from me on the bus staring at nothing and likely thinking about their normal crushes.
I don’t think about Genevieve. She’s staring up at me now like I’m all she thinks about, like I should be inching toward her lips, as she is mine. I go for it, to prove myself wrong. I turn at the last second and we bump heads.
“Ow!” Genevieve laughs. “Watch it, dumb-idiot.”
“Sorry.” I rub my forehead.
“Take two?”
I nod and she jokingly backs away as if she were in danger of another head-butt. She pulls me toward her and when she turns left, I freak out and turn left too and we hit each other again. Maybe this time she’ll take it as a message from the universe that I’m the wrong boy to be kissing.
I know I can’t possibly be fooling her, or anyone, and that’s my problem—without her, I definitely won’t be fooling anyone. I pull her to me, and this time I get it right, and when it’s done I laugh, which probably wouldn’t make anyone feel good. But Genevieve smiles—and then punches me in the arm.
“I suspect I’ll be hitting you a lot.”
(AGE SIXTEEN—OCTOBER, NINE MONTHS AGO)
I’m in the school library rereading Scorpius Hawthorne and the Legion of the Dragon when I catch him looking at me from the fantasy section. Collin Vaughn is another junior, and he’s what I like to call an almost-jock: he hasn’t been able to get on the basketball team since freshman year but acts superior anyway during gym class.
Collin walks over with two books and pulls out the chair across from me. “Cool if I sit?”
“Cool,” I say. “I see you reading these fantasy books and comics a lot during class and lunch.” His brown eyes wander to my Scorpius Hawthorne book. “Are these any good?” He slides over The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and The Hobbit.
“Hitchhiker’s Guide is really fucking funny,” I say.
The librarian rolls her eyes at me before returning to her trashy-looking romance novel.
“I haven’t read The Hobbit, but the movies are epic,” I add.
He knocks on the Scorpius Hawthorne book. “Ha. I haven’t read these books, but saw the movies.”
Some people are obsessed with the works of Jane Austen or William Shakespeare or Stephen King, but I grew up with the demonic boy wizard, so whenever someone my age tells me they haven’t read these books, I imagine a Reaping spell being fired into the sky because a childhood is dead. “Why the hell not?”
Collin smiles. “Never got around to them.”
“But you willingly walked into those movie theaters and kicked your feet up?”
“Aren’t they the same thing?”
“You are the worst,” I tell him. “If I bring you the first Scorpius Hawthorne book tomorrow, will you read it this weekend?”
“I’ll give it a shot. Meet back here tomorrow?”
“We’ll keep meeting back here until you can recite The Seven Laws of Hybrid Magic.”
I’m acting like I’m reading the final pages of Legion of the Dragon when Collin comes into the library looking for me. He sits right across from me, not asking this time, and says, “You got the goods?” It’s a tone someone might mistake for drug dealing.
I slide the backpack over to him. I packed the first two Scorpius Hawthorne books plus The Once and Future King, A Game of Thrones, and a couple comics in case he’s in the insanely minuscule percentage of the universe that doesn’t like the demonic boy wizard who inspired a fucking amusement park and seven films. “I tossed in some classics too. What got you into fantasy?”
Collin opens the backpack and opens the first page of Scorpius Hawthorne and the Monster’s Scepter; if this Leteo Institute weren’t bullshit and I could get a free procedure, I would definitely have my memory of ever reading this series buried so I could relive these books again for the first time. “I like pretending, I guess.” The pages are yellowed and he sees my illustration of the horn
ed Alastor Riggs, the Overlord of the Silver Crown School. “You draw?”
“Yeah. It’s a thing I do,” I say. I normally don’t think I’m an awesome artist, because one should always exhibit some modesty, but Collin studies my drawings like he would bid high for them in one of our dumb school auctions. “You should be honored I’m loaning you my original and sacred copies, but I should warn you that I will destroy you like a Bone Grinder if you ruin them.”
“I actually get that reference,” Collin says, and it makes me feel like there’s still hope for him. “Those are the trolls from the first movie, right?” He just compared a skinless demon to a dumb troll—hope killed.
A couple of weeks later, Collin hands me back my copy of Scorpius Hawthorne and the Hollows, the final book in the series. Inside is a note asking me to check yes or no without a question. But I know what he’s talking about and it doesn’t scare me like I thought it would if this day ever came.
I check yes and slide it back across the table.
Collin reads it, folds the paper into his front pocket, nods and says, “Cool.”
After school there’s a basketball game and I tell Genevieve I’m going to hang back and watch it. She thought it was weird, but wasn’t too bothered by it because it gave her a little extra time to focus on her homework without me calling to distract her. Collin told his girlfriend, Nicole, that he wanted to see if any of the players who made the cut are actually worth anything.
But we don’t watch the game.
I chase him up the staircase to the top floor and, out of breath, I ask him, “Why me? And don’t try and shrug your way out of this one, or tell me I’m cool.”
He shrugs.
I fake going downstairs.
He grabs my arm. “Because I could tell you were different without it being obvious to everyone else you were different, okay? Someone would have to sit down and get to know you to actually figure it out, if that makes sense. And I like what I’ve seen so far. That do it for you?”